The Headless Cupid Read online

  David grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “I know what you mean. Like the way she was at breakfast. If one of us kids acted that way, you’d really blast us.”

  Dad laughed. “You’re probably right. And if she keeps it up, I may blast Amanda a little, eventually. But for the time being I’m trying to remember to be patient. And I hope you kids will, too.”

  David looked his father right in the eye, “Sure,” he said. “Sure, Dad.” He really meant it, too, but at the same time he wondered what it would be like to look at Dad that way and not say anything, or even smile.

  David went on standing there, wondering, while his dad backed the car out of the garage—and that was a mistake. Part way down the drive the car stopped, and Dad rolled down the window.

  “I almost forgot,” Dad said. “Would you get started weeding the flower beds in front of the house? The ones we were watering on Saturday. Remember?”

  “Yeah,” David said. “I remember.”

  “Get started on them this morning, all of you. Tell the twins and Janie to help, too. Tell them I said you were all to work for a while before anyone starts playing.”

  “How about Amanda?”

  “We’ll leave that up to Molly. But I should think Amanda could help, too.”

  Dad backed on down the driveway, and David sighed. It wasn’t the weeding itself he minded so much as the part about getting Janie and the twins to help. He’d been that route before. Getting that bunch to work together on something was like having one of those dreams where you keep running and running and never getting anywhere. Besides, David had been hoping to talk to Amanda before she locked herself in her room again. He wanted to talk some more about the supernatural and maybe get a chance to look at some of her books. He really doubted if she would be helping with the weeding.

  Back in the kitchen, when David made the announcement about the weeding, Janie and the twins couldn’t wait to get started. They’d never weeded before, and they were always enthusiastic about anything new—at least, for the first couple of minutes. Amanda was still sitting at the table saying nothing.

  “You run along and help for a while, too,” Molly said to her, and Amanda just went on saying nothing.

  David looked at Molly, and Molly looked at Amanda, and Amanda looked at her plate. Then Molly took a deep breath and went over to the table and took Amanda by the arm. “Get up from there this minute and go outside and help!” Molly said in a very angry voice.

  Amanda stood up slowly, jerked her arm away, and walked out the door after Janie and the twins, and David followed. He didn’t look back at Molly.

  David had to make a detour to the garage for the tools so the rest of them were already milling around the garden when he got there. All except Amanda, who was curled up on the wrought iron garden bench. David walked around inspecting things, trying to decide who should do what. The ground was soft and damp because Dad had been soaking it since they moved in. The real estate agent had said the old Westerly ladies had kept beautiful gardens, but everything had been neglected during the time the house was up for sale. Now, flowers and bushes that had been almost dead were coming back to life, but there were weeds everywhere.

  “Tesser and Blair,” David said, “you’re too little for the hoes, so you’ll have to pull the weeds up by hand. You do this little place over here, just up to the rose bushes. And Janie you take this next—”

  But as usual, Janie had her own ideas. “I want to do those big thistles out by the fence,” she said.

  “But that’s the hardest,” David said. “You’re too little.”

  “I’m not! I’m not too little. I want to do the thistles!”

  David sighed. It was his own fault. He should have had better sense than to tell Janie she was too little for something. He picked up a hoe and started in on the place he’d planned to give to Janie, and Janie marched out to the thistle patch. At least, David told himself, he’d had enough sense not to try to tell Amanda what to do. That would really have been embarrassing. It was bad enough just having her lounging there on the bench watching everything through narrowed eyes, smiling the upside-down smile.

  Inwardly David shrugged his shoulders. Let her do what she wanted, it wasn’t any of his business. He’d done what Dad told him and that was all he was going to do. He’d gotten the kids started, but from now on they were on their own. If they didn’t do it right, and they probably wouldn’t, he wasn’t going to say a thing. Not with Amanda lying there watching him.

  David turned his back on everybody, put his mind on his hoeing, and worked hard. It must have been about five minutes later that he heard a weird sound and straightened up. It sounded like a wailing scream, and it seemed to come from the thistle patch. He looked that way in time to see Janie staggering out of the thistles waving her hoe in one hand and clutching her chest with the other. She staggered a few more steps and collapsed on the ground. David was starting to run towards her when she jumped up again.

  “What’s the matter, Janie?” David called.

  “I’m fighting a battle,” Janie called. “See, the thistles are the enemy soldiers and I’m the good guys and the hoe is my sword. And I rush in and attack and slay them. Only when a thistle touches me then I’m slayed.”

  “Slain,” David said, walking over to take a look. A few of the thistles were chopped off at various heights and a few more were just bent over. David started to mention that at the rate she was going it was going to take a hundred years of war to get rid of the thistle patch, but then he remembered. He’d done what he said he would and that was enough. If Dad wanted to turn Janie into a gardener, he’d have to do it himself. David went back to his area, and Janie waved her hoe and charged back into the thistle patch, yelling at the top of her lungs.

  David went on working. The twins did, too. They pulled up one weed at a time and then stood up and walked very slowly to the edge of the garden and put it down, and went slowly back. While they were walking, they were watching the battle in the thistle patch. David clenched his teeth to keep from saying anything and went on hoeing.

  When he had cleared a large area and his back and hands were beginning to hurt, he straightened up. Nobody else had accomplished enough to notice, and Amanda was still sitting on the iron bench. David went over and sat down on the bench, too, being careful not to look at Amanda. He wasn’t going to be the first to say something, in case she wasn’t speaking to him today either.

  He sat for a few minutes resting his back. In that time Blair carried the same weed back and forth several times before he remembered to put it down, and Tesser quit working altogether and just stood there watching Janie. David didn’t really blame the twins too much. As usual, Janie was being extremely noticeable. In about five minutes David watched several noisy galloping charges through the thistle patch, and a couple of violent deaths complete with horrible gurgling noises and final twitches.

  “They’re not getting a whole lot done, are they?” Amanda said suddenly, and David almost jumped he was so surprised to hear her voice.

  “You can say that again,” he said, shaking his head. “Nobody can make that Janie do anything. Not unless it’s her own idea anyway. I mean, nobody.”

  There was a long pause before Amanda said, “I’ll bet I could.”

  “How?” David asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’d have to think about it. But I bet I could.”

  David shrugged skeptically and went on watching what was probably supposed to be a wounded horse. Janie was galloping around making whinnying noises and leaning over farther and farther to one side.

  When the horse finished dying Amanda said, “You want to see me?”

  David had gotten so intrigued by Janie’s dying horse technique he had forgotten what they were talking about. “See you what?” he asked.

  “See me make Janie do something.”

  “Sure,” David said. “Help yourself.”

  Amanda looked back towards the house very carefully. There was no sign of anyone
watching. Then she yelled, “Hey kids!”

  Esther and Blair came right over, but it took two or three louder yells to reach Janie over the noise of battle.

  When she had everyone’s attention, Amanda said, “Okay kids, we’re going to play a new game. It’s called Slaves and Slavedriver.”

  Amanda was the slavedriver. She took off her belt and tied it onto a stick for a whip. Then she made everyone pull weeds, and she marched up and down whipping and yelling, “Faster! Faster!”

  It worked for quite a while. Everyone pulled like mad, and Janie had a great time moaning and suffering when she got whipped. Amanda’s belt was only made of cloth, so it didn’t really hurt; but it was easy to pretend it did because Amanda swung it so hard and so much like she meant it. It made the game exciting enough to keep everyone interested for a long time. By the time Janie began to demand a chance to be the slavedriver, an amazing amount of garden had been weeded.

  When the front door opened suddenly and Molly came out on the porch, Amanda handed Janie the whip and strolled back to the bench. David went over to talk to Molly. Molly was amazed at how much work had been done.

  “Yeah,” David said. “Dad’ll be surprised.”

  “He’ll be very pleased. Did Amanda help?”

  “Sure,” David said. “She helped a lot.”

  Molly went over to the bench and said something to Amanda and patted her on the shoulder. From the porch, David couldn’t tell for sure, but it didn’t look as if Amanda said anything.

  Afterwards Janie went on playing slavedriver with Blair and Tesser as slaves, and David took Amanda on a tour of the property. He showed her the little grove of very old trees behind the house and the dry creek bed at the very end of the lot. In the stable-garage he showed her the old mangers where the horses used to eat, and the loft up above. They sat for a while in the loft and talked.

  “Why did you tell my mother I helped?” Amanda asked.

  “Because you did,” David said. “We’d never have gotten half as much done if you hadn’t thought of that slavedriver business.”

  Amanda made her snorting noise. “Big deal,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to get the weeding done. I was just practicing my powers. An important part of being an occult person is developing your power over other people. I just wanted to see if I could make them do it.”

  “Well you sure did,” David said.

  Amanda shrugged. “There’s nothing to it once you’ve developed your powers.”

  “What was wrong with telling your mother you helped?” David asked. “She would have been awfully mad if you hadn’t.”

  “I don’t care,” Amanda said.

  David stared at her. “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because I hate her. That’s why not.”

  “You hate Molly?” David could hardly believe it. Molly just didn’t seem like the kind of person anyone would hate. You might feel as if you could do without her maybe, but there wasn’t anything much about her to hate.

  “I hate her,” Amanda said, “because she divorced my father.”

  “My dad said they divorced each other,” David said. “They kind of agreed on it.”

  “Well, that’s not what my dad says, and he ought to know. She divorced him, and then when I was almost getting used to living with Mom in our apartment and had a friend and everything, then she goes and marries your father, who’s practically poor and has a whole bunch of kids for her to take care of that aren’t even hers, and we have to move out here to the country where I can’t see Leah anymore, and I’ll have to go to some crummy old country school where there won’t be anybody who’s anything like me, and everybody will hate me.”

  “Wow!” David said, and then after a minute he added, “My dad isn’t poor.”

  “Well, he is compared to my dad.”

  “How do you know?” David asked.

  “Because my dad told me so.”

  “Oh,” David said. “Did he tell you all that other stuff, too?”

  “He didn’t have to tell me that. I knew it already. But we talked about it. My dad understands how I feel. He doesn’t blame me for being mad.”

  David only nodded because he couldn’t think of anything else to say, and after a while Amanda said, “I’ll bet your dad doesn’t like the supernatural, either. I’ll bet he hates it. Doesn’t he?”

  “No,” David said. “I don’t think he hates it. He usually just smiles when we talk about anything like that.”

  “See!” Amanda said fiercely. “That’s just what I meant.”

  “My mother really liked it though,” David said. “In fact—” David paused and looked at Amanda, “—she was a little bit that way herself. Supernatural, I mean.”

  “Yeah?” Amanda said. “Like what?”

  David said slowly. “Well, she believed in ghosts and spirits, and she talked to animals, and she liked anything that was strange and fantastic. I think she knew about things that hadn’t happened yet, too. At least sometimes.”

  “Your mother believed in things like that?”

  David nodded.

  “Weird,” Amanda said.

  But David was busy thinking about what he had said—about the ways in which his mother had been supernatural. He was remembering that she believed in good omens, like rainbows and church bells. And that she was always finding magical messages in ordinary things. He remembered too, about her premonitions—how she sometimes seemed to know about things that were going to happen. After she died, David had realized that she had probably known she was going to die a long time before anyone else did. David knew because, looking back, he could see that she had started getting him ready to help his father take care of the family, way back before anyone else knew that she was even very sick.

  Suddenly, what Amanda had said registered with David.

  “Weird?” he asked. “What’s weird about being supernatural? I thought you were yourself.”

  “Well sure,” Amanda said. “It just seems like a weird thing for your mother to be.”

  Chapter Five

  DAVID WAS BEGINNING TO FIND OUT THAT THE ONE THING YOU COULD count on with Amanda was surprises. After they’d had the long conversation in the loft of the garage, and talked about their mothers and other important subjects, David thought he’d gotten to know her, at least a little. But the next time he spoke to her, she made a face as if she were about to throw up and slowly and deliberately turned her back on him. David didn’t get it! He didn’t get it at all—except that Molly happened to be coming into the room just then and that probably had something to do with it. Later, the evening of that same day, David was sitting on the front steps, looking out across the lawn that was beginning to turn green again, when Amanda came out of the house and stood right in front of him.

  David looked at her warily until she smiled and said, “I’m going herb hunting. Want to come along?”

  She started off so fast that David almost had to run to catch up. “Herbs?” he said. “What kind of herbs?”

  “Oh, the usual thing.”

  “You mean for cooking?”

  “No, stupid. For magic. Some herbs have magical powers. You need herbs for nearly every kind of spell or potion or philter. Leah buys hers at an herb store, but out in the country you can pick your own if you know what to look for.”

  “What kinds are you looking for?”

  “Oh, wolfsbane and deathcup and bloodroot—things like that.”

  “Where are you going to look?”

  “Well, a cemetery would be the best place. You don’t know of one around here, do you?”

  “No,” David said. “Not around here.”

  “I didn’t think you would. I was planning to look along the sides of the road. That’s a pretty good spot. Particularly if you know of a place where someone died. Or at a crossroad. A crossroad is a good place for all sorts of supernatural things.”

  The nearest crossroad was almost a half a mile away, and when they got there Amanda looked around and picked s
ome sprigs off several plants. It seemed to David that the stuff she called wolfsbane was just plain old anise, and bloodroot looked a lot like ordinary Queen Anne’s lace. Amanda got excited, though, when she found it.

  “Are you sure that’s wolfsbane,” David asked, “because it sure looks like—”

  “Look!” Amanda said. “I’ve used wolfsbane hundreds of times and it always looks and smells just like this, except drier, of course. Leah gets it at the herb store, and it costs about $5.00 for just a few leaves. Leah says it’s very rare and expensive.”

  David guessed Leah must have known what she was talking about, but he wished he’d known you could sell that weed—whatever it was—for that much money.

  On the way home, carrying her bag of herbs, Amanda talked some more about Leah and the things she did. Leah had studied palmistry, and at school she had set up a noontime palm reading service. Because palmistry is a very complicated thing to learn and Amanda had only begun to study, she usually collected the money, fifty cents a palm, and kept track of the scheduling of clients, while Leah did the readings. Amanda was also in charge of talking to the kids who were waiting their turn, to discover who might be interested in buying a love philter or a curse.

  “How much did those cost?”

  “That depended,” Amanda said.

  “On what?”

  “On how much allowance the kid got. And on how much they wanted to get even with someone or make someone like them. Some of the love philters we got a whole dollar for. The curses were usually a little cheaper.”

  “You must have made a lot of money.”

  “I didn’t. Leah kept most of it.”

  “How come?” David asked. “Why didn’t you get half?”

  “Because most of the supplies we used were Leah’s, and besides she was always broke because her father never paid his child support. But I was going to get to keep some of the money after I’d finished all my rites of initiation. Then, just when I got everything learned, I had to leave.”